Middlesex bags Pulitzer prize for fiction

Jeffrey Eugenides has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, one of America's most prestigious literary awards, for Middlesex, a complex and wide-ranging novel about an adolescent Greek-American hermaphrodite.

Published 10 years after his acclaimed debut, The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex follows the progress of a hermaphrodite gene through one family from a village in Asia Minor, through 20th-century Detroit, and on to contemporary Berlin. It has been praised for its epic scale and for the freshness Eugenides brings to two classic literary scenarios, the family saga and the trials of coming of age.

Northern Irish-born poet Paul Muldoon was awarded the Pulitzer for poetry for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel. Muldoon, who teaches full-time at Princeton University and is honorary professor of poetry at Oxford, has previously won a number of high profile poetry awards including the TS Eliot prize.

The non-fiction prizes were dominated by books concerned with politics and war. The best general non-fiction book was Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. It is a critical analysis of America's failure to tackle humanitarian crimes in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda in the 1980s, written by a journalist who was reporting in Yugoslavia during the country's break-up.

The history award went to Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn, which considers the actions of US troops in North Africa in 1942-1943 as they headed for the second world war in Europe.

Robert Caro won his second Pulitzer prize with the third volume of his biography of President Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate, in which he focuses on the parliamentary strategy of LBJ. He first won the prize in 1975 for his biography of Robert Moses, a planner who oversaw the construction of many of New York's bridges and tunnels.

Winners will receive a $7,500 cash award and a certificate at a ceremony at Columbia University next month.